Posted on 06/04/2008 8:01:01 AM PDT by Mike Fieschko
Ooo. Fellow Debian user. Excellent!
See My previous post: Some people just can not run Linux. I have one particular friend that can surf the internet with IE, and use some of the MS Office programs but just gets angry and frustrated with Linux no matter which version I attempted to get him used to. So, at this point I have just given up and accept the fact that he will forever be addicted to Windows.
The same way that Windows users do it. Buy hardware that is supported by the operating system.
According to the documentation, my card is supposed to be "supported". The problem is the same one that Linux has always had - many hardware and software vendors do not write code for Linux. So while the generic drivers that came with Ubuntu would allow me to see a maximum resolution of 800x600 on my 19" monitor (default resolution of 1280x1024), that is hardly what I would consider "working". The "restricted drivers", which were supposed to allow access to hardware acceleration, etc, would give me a black screen with a white box for a mouse cursor. I downloaded the beta drivers from NVidia that were supposed to work, but the installer would fail until I took 2 GB of RAM out of the box and added some obscure, poorly documented switches to the command line.
The point is, if Linux does not provide support for the most popular and current chipsets for video and audio, it is a severely limiting factor for most casual users. Most home users still want the Plug-and-Play convenience, and in my opinion, Linux still lacks in this area.
Nothing is perfect for everyone. If your friend is unable to accept a mild “moving of the waterdish” then he is best advised to stay with Windows. Of course, Vista is a much greater change from XP from a user interface standpoint than most Linuxes are. ;)
As has been pointed out, what you’re really unhappy about is a complex installation problem for Linux. This is where Windows really wins, because most users never have to install it. If they tried Linux boxes with the OS preinstalled, they’d be happy as clams. Users don’t actually want Plug ‘n’ Play convenience, they want their computers to work as appliances and to not have to think about them (this is entirely what they should want, too). If they had to install Windows on bare iron, they’d be more frustrated than you have been with Linux, I suspect. But there’s been no great outrage about the Walmart Linux-installed computers, that I know of. I think that shows that your opinions about Linux vs. Windows on a daily operations level are misinformed.
So what you are saying is that the drivers written by the Xorg people that ship with Ubuntu worked, but they don't fully exploit the hardware.
The restricted drivers provided by nVidia and the drivers downloaded directly from nVidia are broken.
Guess what? Your trouble is with nVidia, not Ubuntu.
nVidia refuses to fully document their hardware, shutting out driver developers and requiring users to rely on closed, broken nVidia software.
Like I said before...
Buy hardware that is fully supported. Do your research. The best supported video chipsets today are made by Intel and Matrox. That's because they both fully document the hardware interfaces and device driver programmers can write decent drivers.
Or buy a machine with Linux already installed. When you do that you have done the same thing, except that the hardware manufacturer has already done the research for you.
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